Scenes of the Crime

The following is excerpted and adapted from the screenplay for the forthcoming movie “The Counselor” (directed by Ridley Scott; to be released in November).

MEXICAN GARAGE. A welder in coveralls and goggles is cutting a line along the side of the tank of a Ford F650 septic-tank truck with an acetylene torch. The tank of the truck has been cut in two laterally and a hoist is lowering a fifty-five-gallon drum into the open top of the tank. The welder is standing in the tank waiting to unfasten the hooks and the cable.

MEXICAN GARAGE. The welder is welding the top of the tank back in place.

A SMALL MEXICAN port town on the Gulf of California. Several trucks are being unloaded and are driven along the dock toward a warehouse with a sign over the door that says “Aduana.” One of the trucks is the septic-tank truck. It is waved aside and the driver hands a brown envelope down to the customs inspector, who puts it inside the front of his coat, and the truck drives out to the road.

SOUTHWESTERN DESERT. The septic-tank truck is sitting in the chaparral. The driver opens the door and stands up, holding on to the roof of the cab and the top of the open door. Another man watches through the windshield with a pair of binoculars. In the distance, a line of stragglers crossing through the chaparral, men and women, carrying suitcases and laundry bags over their shoulders. The standing man takes a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lights it and blows the smoke gently.

DESERT. THE SUN has just set. Bare purple mountains are dark against a darkening sky streaked with deep red. There is the high, thin scream of a motorcycle in the far distance, very slowly becoming louder. Then it streaks across the middle distance in a small part of a second, really just a blink of lights, and whines away.

A SMALL GROCERY STORE. A young man dressed in a bright-green leather motorcycle outfit—jacket and tight pants and green boots and gloves—is waiting in line, his helmet hanging over his arm. He is somewhat dark. Part Mexican. The woman in front of him has unloaded her groceries onto the conveyor belt and the clerk is adding them up. She turns and smiles at the man. He is holding a ten-pound bag of dog food.

SOUTHWESTERN DESERT. The septic-tank truck and a pickup are parked in the chaparral. The two Mexican drivers are talking to two other men. They squat on the ground. One passes around a pack of cigarettes. Then he picks up a stick and draws a map in the dirt.

A WAREHOUSE WITH floodlights. The metal door clanks upward and the green-leather motorcyclist comes whining through on a Kawasaki ZX-12R and brakes and does a doughnut on the concrete floor and stops and shuts off the bike and takes off his helmet. A Doberman runs to him and stands up and he hugs her and tousles her ears and steps off the bike. There is a black late-model Cadillac Escalade parked toward the rear of the warehouse. He crosses the room, with the dog leaping about him, to an island in the far corner that contains a kitchen and a bed, a tin locker, and a leather easy chair, taking the bag of dog food with him. He fixes the dog a bowl of food and turns on the stereo and opens the refrigerator and takes out a frozen dinner and puts it in the microwave and opens a beer and sits, watching the dog eat. He puts the beer on the table and stands up and takes off the leather jacket and unzips a pocket and takes out a clear plastic bag and pitches it onto the table. It is full of hundred-dollar bills.

NIGHT. NORTHERN Mexico at the U.S. border. The septic-tank truck is lumbering over the desert, driving with only the parking lights on. The truck crests a slight rise and grinds to a halt. In the distance are the lights of a city.

YARD OF THE Pump Masters Septic Tank Pumping Company. Early morning. The trucks are pulling out one by one and the yard master is checking them off on his clipboard. When they are all gone, there is one truck left in the yard.

A LARGE MOTORCYCLE store in the city. A man enters and stands looking. He crosses to where a Kawasaki ZX-12R motorcycle is circling slowly on a motorized dais. The dais is marked off with a blue velvet rope and the man approaches and stands looking at the bike for a moment, then unhooks the rope and lets it fall to the floor and mounts the dais and stands circling with it. A clerk talking to a customer nearby sees him. The clerk comes over to the dais. The man has taken a steel tape measure from his coat pocket and is measuring the height of the Kawasaki at the handlebars.

BORDER CITY. EVENING. An outdoor café adjoining a parking lot. Metal chairs and tables. Traffic. A Mexican man is sitting at one of the tables with a cup of coffee before him and a newspaper. The young man in green pulls up on the Kawasaki ZX-12R. He takes off the gloves and the helmet and puts the gloves inside the helmet and steps off the bike and walks to where the man is sitting and kicks back a chair and sits down.

THE MAN AT THE table rises and goes, leaving the paper on the table. The kid sits at the table and opens the newspaper and reads.

THE KID RAKES AN object from under the paper into his helmet and puts down the paper and stands and puts the helmet under his arm and crosses the plaza to his bike and puts his foot over the bike and starts it and pulls his gloves from the helmet and lays them on the tank in front of him and pulls on the helmet and fastens the strap and then pulls on the gloves and kicks back the stand and pulls away into the traffic.

NIGHT. TWO-LANE blacktop road through the high desert. A car passes and the lights recede down the long straight and fade out. A man walks out from the scrub cedars that line the road and stands in the middle of the road and lights a cigarette. He is carrying a roll of thin braided wire over one shoulder. He continues across the road to the fence. A tall metal pipe is mounted to one of the fence posts and at the top—some twenty feet off the ground—is a floodlight. The man pushes the button on a small plastic sending unit and the light comes on, flooding the road and the man’s face. He turns it off and walks down the fence line a good hundred yards to the corner of the fence and here he drops the coil of wire to the ground and takes a flashlight from his back pocket and puts it in his teeth and takes a pair of leather gloves from his belt and puts them on. Then he loops the wire around the corner post and pulls the end of the wire through the loop and wraps it about six times around the wire itself and tucks the end several times inside the loop and then takes the wire in both hands and hauls it as tight as he can get it. Then he takes the coil of wire and crosses the road, letting out the wire behind him. In the cedars on the far side, a flatbed truck is parked with the bed of the truck facing the road. There is an iron pipe at the right rear of the truck bed mounted vertically in a pair of collars so that it can slide up and down and the man threads the wire through a hole in the pipe and pulls it taut and stops it from sliding back by clamping the wire with a pair of vise grips. Then he walks back out to the road and takes a tape measure from his belt and measures the height of the wire from the road surface. He goes back to the truck and lowers the iron pipe in its collars and clamps it in place again with a threaded lever that he turns by hand against the vertical rod. He goes out to the road and measures the wire again and comes back and wraps the end of the wire through a heavy three-inch iron ring and walks to the front of the truck, where he pulls the wire taut and wraps it around itself to secure the ring at the end of the wire and then pulls the ring over a hook mounted in the side rail of the truck bed. He stands looking at it. He strums the wire with his fingers. It gives off a deep resonant note. He unhooks the ring and walks the wire to the rear of the truck until it lies slack on the ground and in the road. He lays the ring on the truck bed and goes around and takes a walkie-talkie from a work bag in the cab of the truck and stands in the open door of the truck, listening. He checks his watch by the dome light in the cab.

HE TURNS OFF the walkie-talkie and takes the cigarette from his mouth and grinds it into the dirt and shuts the door of the truck. He looks at his watch. Very thin in the distance we can hear the high-pitched scream of the Kawasaki bike flat out at eleven thousand r.p.m.

SHOT OF THE green rider bent low over the bike at a hundred and ninety miles an hour. Suddenly, the floodlight comes on and he raises up and turns his head to look at it.

THE TRUCK. THE desert is suddenly lit to the north of the wire man and he takes the ring and carries it forward and pulls it over the hook. The wire hums.

SHOT OF THE green rider with his face turned back to the floodlight, which is now behind him. Suddenly, his head zips away and, in the helmet, goes bouncing down the highway behind the bike. The bike continues on, the motor slows and dies to silence, and in the distance we see a long slither of sparks recede into the dark.

THE TRUCK. THE man clips the wire at the ring with a pair of wire cutters and the wire zips away. He walks out to the road with the walkie-talkie. In the road, he shines the light down the blacktop and then walks down the roadside ditch until he comes to the helmet.

“How come you never want to spend time with my friends during our conjugal visits?”

HE PUTS AWAY the walkie-talkie and bends over and picks up the helmet. It is surprisingly heavy. He goes back to the truck and opens the cab door on the driver’s side and puts the helmet on the floor and shuts the door and goes out to the road and crosses to the fence, where he cuts the wire free from the fence post and begins to wind it up as he walks, passing the wire over his elbow at each turn to make a coil. He stows the wire in a toolbox under the bed of the truck and gets in the truck and starts it and turns on the lights and drives out into the road.

DESERT, NIGHT. THE truck drives past the headless body sprawled in the road. Then it stops. The man looks out the window of the truck at the body, then backs up the truck and gets out. He picks up the feet and drags the body into the ditch and wipes his hands on his pants and then gets back in the truck and pulls away down the highway.

FRONT GATE OF the septic-tank company. The flatbed truck pulls up and the wire man gets out and shuts the door. He is holding a battery-driven die grinder in one hand and he watches the road behind him, where a single light is approaching. Sound of a motorcycle. The cycle pulls up and the rider gets off and kicks down the stand, and the wire man goes to the gate and turns on the die grinder and bends to cut the padlock on the gate. A sheaf of sparks lights up the area, and the lock falls to the ground in about twenty seconds. He pushes open the gate and then bends and picks up the lock and juggles it in his hand and throws it into the bushes.

THE SEPTIC-TANK truck on a two-lane blacktop road in central Texas. A late-model sedan is following it, two men in the car. The passenger in the sedan plugs a flashing red roof light into the cigarette lighter in the dash and reaches out the window and places the light on the roof of the car. Then he takes a black box off the seat and holds it at the window and turns it on and it begins to emit a police-siren sound. The septic-tank truck slows and pulls over onto the verge and comes to a halt. The sedan pulls in some distance behind it and the two men get out, putting on white Stetson hats. They are dressed in boots and tan slacks and white shirts and wear automatic sidearms. The driver of the truck—the wire man—watches them in the rearview mirror. The boots of the co-driver of the truck are moving back along the passenger side of the truck. The driver starts the truck and pulls away. The two men in the road have almost reached the truck and they draw their pistols and run forward. The co-driver of the truck is now lying in the bar ditch, and when the truck clears his position the two men in the road are exposed directly in front of him and he opens fire on them with a pistol, dropping one of them dead in the road and wounding the other in the leg. The wounded man dives into the ditch on the other side of the road. The truck has come to a stop again, angled slightly toward the road, and the driver opens fire on the wounded man with a pistol from the truck window. The wounded man presses himself flat in the ditch and takes careful aim with his pistol and shoots the driver in the head. The driver’s pistol clatters into the road. The co-driver in the ditch sees the pistol fall. He studies the far side of the road and then backs down into the ditch and crouches and runs along the ditch toward the truck. The wounded man sees the man’s back moving along the ditch and he stands and fires three rounds after him. The last round hits the tank of the truck and brown sewage starts to spout from the hole. The co-driver reaches the truck and opens the door and clambers in over the body slumped on the floor and, crouching over the body, he reaches and pushes the clutch to the floor with his hand and drops the shifter into first gear and reaches and releases the emergency brake. He pushes down the accelerator with one hand and lets the clutch out with the other and the truck moves forward into the road. The wounded man climbs out of the ditch and hobbles back to the car and gets in and shuts the door. He lays the pistol on the seat and reaches under the seat and takes out an AR-15 machine pistol with a twenty-round clip and pushes off the safety and starts the car and pulls out down the road after the truck. The truck has wandered to the far side of the road and the car pulls up along the passenger side of the truck and the wounded man opens fire with the AR-15, emptying the clip into the door of the truck. Then he backs away and pulls to the verge and sits watching. The truck veers slowly off the road in front of him and rolls down into the bar ditch, where it tilts up onto two wheels and balances for a moment and then drops back onto all four wheels and sits there in silence. In the rearview mirror, the man in the car can see another car approaching, very small on the long stretch of blacktop road. He can see the pistol lying in the road and, beyond that, the dead body. The approaching car is shimmering in the heat waves off the road. The man’s trouser leg is dark with blood to his boot. He places his hand on his thigh and leans forward slightly in pain. He turns the AR-15 on the seat and ejects the empty clip and reaches under the seat and gets hold of a small canvas bag and puts it in his lap and unzips it and takes out a loaded clip and loads the AR-15 and pushes back the slide with the heel of his hand. The approaching car has slowed. Now it stops. It turns sideways in the road and backs up and swings around and heads back the way it came. The wounded man has opened the door and he steps out and levels the AR-15 and opens fire on the fleeing car. He empties the clip and then lowers the gun and stands watching. The car slows and drifts off the road and down into the bar ditch and comes to a stop. The man reaches into the car and gets another clip and reloads the AR-15 and turns and goes down the bank to the truck.

SEWAGE IS STILL leaking from the bullet hole in the tank. The man limps up to the passenger side of the truck, with the gun at the ready, and pulls open the door and steps back. Then he steps up and reaches into the truck and pulls out a body by the belt and lets it fall into the grass. Then he pulls the other one out on top of it. He turns and climbs up out of the ditch and stands in the road and looks up the road and down. He limps down the road to the car and gets the pistol and the pouch of clips off the seat and takes the keys out of the ignition and goes to the rear of the car and opens the trunk and gets out his bag.

THE MAN IS sitting in the front seat of the septic-tank truck whittling with his knife on a tree branch. His open bag is sitting on the seat beside him. There is a box of 9-mm. cartridges in the open bag and he takes one of the cartridges out and compares the diameter of the bullet to the diameter of the stick he is whittling. Now he cuts a ring around the branch about three inches from the end. The man climbs down from the cab of the truck and walks back and jams the end of the stick into the hole in the truck. He breaks off the branch and throws it to one side and folds away his knife and wipes his hands on his trousers and taps the plug in more firmly with the pistol and then goes back and climbs painfully up into the cab and shuts the door and rests for a minute with his eyes closed. Then he takes out his cell phone and dials a number and puts the phone to his ear.

PLYWOOD OFFICE of a junk yard in the desert. The junk-yard man is talking on the phone. A pit bull lying on a mat beside his desk growls and stands up. The man looks up. He hangs up the phone and looks at the client. The client comes forward in his bloodstained clothes and limps to a stop and reaches into his jacket. He takes a false-leather pouch with a bank logo from his coat and unzips it and takes out three banded sheaves of hundred-dollar bills and drops them onto the desk. The junk-yard man stands up.

THE SEPTIC-TANK truck is being jacked up on one side with two floor jacks. The junk-yard man operates one of the jacks. The plug has been removed from the hole in the tank and sewage is leaking from the hole. The truck tilts up and the leak slows and then stops.

JUNK YARD. THE owner is standing in a chair, wearing welding goggles and holding an oxyacetylene torch. He melts lead from a stick and spreads it over the bullet hole in the tank with a wooden paddle.

A MOBILE HOME at the edge of the junk yard. Interior. The wounded man is lying on a cheap sofa, with his leg stretched out on a coffee table that is covered with a sheet. There is a plastic bucket on the floor filled with bloody gauze.

A GARAGE, THE septic-tank truck. There is a gantry crane overhead—a chain hoist that slides on iron rails—and a man in coveralls and welding glasses is slicing open the tank of the truck laterally from front to rear with a cutting torch. The top half of the tank is being lifted by two hooks and the chains from the single hook hanging from the pulley. Inside the severed tank lie four fifty-five-gallon steel drums.

THE WASH BAY in the corner of the garage. The four drums are standing upright on pallets and the worker, in coveralls and rubber boots, is hosing them down with a steam washer.

TWO MEN IN breathing masks at the wash bay. One is in work clothes and one is in white coveralls. The worker has an electric driver and is unfastening the tops of the drums. One of the drums is already open, and the man in coveralls takes out four clear plastic bags, each holding a kilo of cocaine. The worker unscrews the bolt on the second drum and lifts away the rim that circles the top of the drum and moves on to the next. ♦